


Life On Fire

by cruisedirector



Category: Equilibrium (2002)
Genre: Background Slash, Canonical Character Death, Loneliness, Love Triangle, Multi, Unrequited Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2003-06-04
Updated: 2003-06-04
Packaged: 2017-10-03 08:07:21
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,155
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15926
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cruisedirector/pseuds/cruisedirector
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In a world where emotions are a crime, a woman and a man try to find happiness.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Life On Fire

Mary was Errol's lover, though she wasn't in love with him. It took her several months to understand the difference, and once she did, she realized that he wasn't in love with her, either. He loved her singing, the soft fabric of her clothes, her perfume; she loved his hands gently massaging her shoulders, his voice when he read poetry aloud, his passion for freedom. Yet they made love mechanically, with their eyes closed. When Mary caught herself fantasizing about Jurgen, who denied himself love in the name of their cause, she wondered whom Errol was dreaming about.

She didn't think it was someone else in the Underground. From the time the resistance had been organized, its members had pledged to resist the violence and rage that had been Libria's excuses for drugging its populace. They all shunned jealousy, exclusivity, possessiveness, and insisted on honesty with one another; if Errol wanted to be with someone else, he had only to tell her so. Still, he came to her regularly and she never noticed his eyes wandering to other women when they met with their friends in the Underground. She guessed that his dream lover must be someone from outside the movement...someone he knew from his work, from his other life. Someone on the dose.

"How did a Grammaton Cleric come to join the fight for freedom?" Mary had asked him the first time they met. Jurgen had introduced her to Errol, and she had wondered cynically whether their leader hoped her wide eyes and warm hands would keep the cleric addicted to sense crime the way most Librians were addicted to Prozium. But Errol, she learned, had been part of the resistance for years -- the son of a council member who strove in vain to lessen the doses of Prozium administered to young people, citing both supply concerns and long-term genetic effects.

The first time Errol's father took him off the dose, he was fourteen and already a rising star in the Monastery. Like a rite of passage, he was brought to an Underground hideaway filled with temptations of the flesh: pounding music, sweet foods, vibrating mattresses, erotic literature. He enjoyed none of it that first time, bent double with terror, realizing that his fear made him as complicit in the crime as his parents.

For years afterward, Errol lived two lives...taking his interval during physical training at the Monastery, stopping the drug periodically to explore his emotions and learn how to control them. He had wanted to leave, but he was too valuable to the Underground on the inside, able to warn Jurgen of raids in the Nether before they were due to occur, training resistance fighters in the combat techniques of clerics.

Errol was, Mary realized, painfully lonely. Unlike herself, he could not risk having a private room of his own filled with art and books. He could only come into the Nether at night, feigning enforcement business, hiding in abandoned buildings with whatever contraband he managed to smuggle away. He did not come to her as often as he said he wanted, which she attributed at first to his fears for her safety -- if he was followed, he could lead other clerics to her -- but she came to realize that he valued time alone, sitting silent and pensive as he listened to a symphony or petted one of the cats that controlled the rodent population in the Nether.

Like Jurgen, Errol took low doses of Prozium whenever he might find himself under scrutiny, particularly before important raids or combat drills. Jurgen was adamant: Errol had to be able to repress his feelings completely, for he might have to destroy any of them in order to protect himself and his position. Only Mary knew how much Errol despised that, and suspected that he did not always dose even when Jurgen told him to do so.

She was sure that Jurgen must have guessed this -- Jurgen saw Errol more often than she did, in the city above as well as the Underground, accompanying him to the Hall of Records and the Freedom Reading Room under the pretext of his job. Yet even without the drug, the fire seemed to be dying slowly in Errol. She wondered whether it was the deadness of Libria, the pain of living a double life or some deeper secret that had made him suffer so.

* * * *

"Who are you thinking of?" Mary asked one afternoon while Errol was reading Shakespeare's sonnets aloud, using the warm, richly inflected voice that she feared might one day give him away.

He glanced at her, then his eyes drifted toward his uniform and the weapon he had left on a table across the room. "My partner," he admitted.

"Do you think that he suspects you?"

Errol smiled broadly, an all-too-rare occurrence. "John? He doesn't have to suspect me. He would know, if he took a moment to look."

"That does not frighten you?"

"Mary, his own wife was arrested and incinerated for sense crime. She'd been off the dose for months. He never saw. I met his children once; I think they're off the dose as well. John is the best marksman I've ever seen, but someone else has to point out the targets or he misses seeing them."

"Prozium will do that to you," she nodded wryly. That made Errol smile again.

"The tragic thing is that they could run their terror state without the drug. The Tetragrammaton doesn't need Prozium to keep John in their clutches -- they just need to keep him busy. He doesn't want to think too much about what he does and why."

Errol's fingers unconsciously rubbed at the corners of the pages of the book he held, until he caught Mary watching and stilled his hand. "Your partner," she realized then. "You care about him, don't you."

Her lover's eyes turned quickly to the floor. "What would be the point? John feels nothing. No, that's not it. I think he's capable of feeling more than any cleric should, despite the intervals. But he doesn't know it, and that's worse somehow."

It was all too easy to imagine Errol studying John, seeking signs of connection where there were none...or worse, where there were, triggering the man's unconscious desires that not even the drug could eradicate in all human beings, driving him to act beyond his own control or the will of the Monastery. "Your partner sounds dangerous. To you. Are your superiors watching him?"

The book shut with a snap. "He's their best assassin. And their slave. They won't come after him." She watched his fingers trace the title, run gently down the spine of the book as if stroking a face, then stop, hovering, aware of her eyes. His tenderness had always moved her -- a Cleric of the Tetragrammaton with such gentle hands -- but she worried about the lack of fire in him, so little will to fight, even for the things he loved.

"Be careful, Errol," she warned quietly. "He may be their best killer _because_ he has feelings."

"I know he is. I expect that the Vice-Consul knows as well." The hooded green eyes grew wistful. "But for him to suspect me...he'd have to begin to notice things he never sees."

* * * *

She knew when the clerics came for her that Errol was dead. For all of Jurgen's insistence that some in the Underground needed to make sacrifices to protect the rest of them, Mary was sure that Errol would never have let them take her, even if it cost him his life. He was a cleric at the highest level of enforcement, and would have been certain to know of a planned raid near her home. Her heart ached for him; she hoped the end had been quick, perhaps even at the hands of one of their colleagues in the Underground, forced to shoot before Errol or his partner could fire in turn.

In a way her acknowledgment of his death was a relief, for they could not threaten her in his name or vice versa. She did not think that she would have talked to protect him -- any promises to spare him would have been lies anyway. But Errol had seemed near the breaking point, unable to keep up the passive front he needed in the Monastery. Mary had hoped Jurgen would pull Errol out and hide him before he gave himself away, but Jurgen told her only that Errol was part of a bigger plan, and that some losses were necessary if they were to make a true assault on the Council and the Prozium facilities.

After the raid she wondered whether she was to become one of those necessary losses. The enforcement team would burn her belongings, she knew, the artwork, the books -- all invaluable, yet all survivable. If the resistance triumphed, men and women would live to create new works of art, to write new poetry and songs. And if the resistance failed, the paintings would become relics like the words to describe emotions that could no longer be experienced.

During processing, Mary learned that Errol had been killed by his own partner, hunted down and shot in the Nether. Her interrogator said he had pulled his weapon, which made her glad, though she guessed that he had done it only to make John shoot him first. She had tried to shoot the man who arrested her as well, not with any real chance of success but in the hope that he would kill her before she could be processed.

To her surprise, they tortured her very little. Like Jurgen's scheme to bring down Father, the Ministry apparently had its own plan to destroy the Underground, and did not seem determined to learn the names of her accomplices. She wondered if they had known about Errol for some time and had kept him close to keep him under surveillance, hoping to use him to expose the others. Perhaps they already knew what they needed from him, so her information was expendable.

Preston -- the man who had led the raid, and was the first to question her afterwards -- reminded her of Errol in some indefinable way. She thought at first that it was just the trappings of a cleric, the stoicism and strength. She had not met many men from the Monastery, had always avoided them, yet this one seemed surprisingly open, listening to her emotional diatribes for longer than she would have anticipated.

She did not expect to see him again after the first debriefing, yet he returned...this time to ask her about Errol Partridge. Preston knew, for he had a picture of her with him. Mary couldn't imagine who would have taken a photograph of the two of them together, nor why even a sentimentalist such as Errol would have permitted such an incalculable risk. Yet there was the image of the two of them standing together, looking past one another in different directions.

She pushed the photo of herself and Errol back across the table at Preston, a true cleric incapable of comprehending Errol. "I understand he's dead," she said, keeping her voice level. "Killed by your friends at the Tetragrammaton." She had asked Preston at their first meeting whether he had any idea what the word "friend" meant when he used it to label her peers in the resistance, and she turned it back on him bitterly.

"Not by my friends," Preston said, shaking his head and compressing his lips in a mockery of real emotion. "By me." It sank in that the cold, unfeeling instrument of Libria before her must have been Errol's partner...his beloved John.

Something inside Mary O'Brien turned slowly molten. Though she wasn't as skilled at repressing her feelings as Jurgen was or even as Partridge had been, she had learned control, particularly of the darker emotions that were used to justify drugging the entire population of Libria. Yet she could not maintain her dispassion in the face of Errol's murderer. There was a stylus on the table. A weapon. She seized it and lunged.

Of course Preston was too fast for her, but again, he did not snap her neck as she knew he could have. Sparing her life, he trapped her beneath his body. The look in his eyes was unreadable -- it might have been rage, or hatred, or even lust -- but it was decidedly not Prozium-induced stupor, and for a shocking moment he reminded her again of Errol, dressed as a cleric but glowing with emotion just under the surface. His gloved fingers hovered by her face. Then he shoved himself away from her, leaving her sprawled, vulnerable, on the table.

Perhaps, Mary guessed, like some of the members of the Council, he did not take a full dose of Prozium, which could interfere with reaction times and the intensity of force in a struggle. The inefficiency of the drugged clerics was the only reason the resistance had lasted so long. Or perhaps a normal interval did not work properly on Preston, as was the case with certain other individuals. There was certainly something odd about John Preston. Perhaps that was what Errol had seen in him.

Errol. The full force of grief hit her -- not for her own loss, for she would be dead soon, but for the life she had been allowed to live in secret while Errol had been in the Monastery, forced to repress every feeling he had about the taking of life, about serving as an instrument of the state. About hope, about love. She sat up slowly, turning her head so that Preston couldn't see.

"You were lovers," Preston said, not a question. Could that have been jealously in his voice? She recalled how closely he had held her when he forced her to look in her mirror, how aware he had seemed of her perfume. Errol had said that John's wife was dead, destroyed for sense crime. Did he miss having a woman? Or was it her connection to Errol that sparked his interest...could he have known somehow that they had touched one another, from the scent of her perfume, from the cadence of her speech?

She almost asked Preston. Then she remembered: this was Errol's murderer, the man he had loved, the man who had killed him and turned him to ashes. She kept her back turned as Preston walked away.

* * * *

He came back once more before her incineration. She did not understand at first, with her execution set. Why would he expect her to talk now?

Then the interval alarm sounded, and Preston's watch beeped. He ignored both. And Mary saw that he was feeling. In fact she had rarely seen a man show such naked emotion so plainly on his face, for even in the Underground they were cautious in daylight, saving their smiles and grief for the dim light of private rooms.

But even as she touched his fingertips with her own -- the only gesture she could risk -- she wondered whether that small concession had signed his death warrant. She was certain that the room was monitored and that John had grown careless. Like Errol. Now that you know, now that you feel, do you miss him? she wanted to ask. Do you dream of him, as I do? Do you dream of the two of you together, light on darkness? Do you see now that he loved you?

She held her tongue. She understood that they must have been watching Preston, hoping that he would lead them to the Underground. She understood too that he saw in her his lost wife, his lost partner, all the lost years when he traded living for intervals. She wondered if _he_ understood that he could not save her. Jurgen would have told him so, but like Errol, she did not think that this cleric would listen even to the head of the resistance. He might have listened to her but she did not dare speak the words.

Under the laws defining sense crime, their small touch of hands constituted illicit relations between a man and a woman. Mary wondered whether Errol had stolen such touches from John, stood too close to him when they swept the Nether together, let his hand brush his partner's as they passed along weapons or evidence. But Errol had been less sensual than herself, content to live without soft fabrics and delicate perfume. He simply could not live without love, even with sweet evenings of poetry and intimacy to sustain him. Not even the hope of revolution had kept him from despair.

Mary supposed with horror that that was why they had teamed him with John: to manipulate the highest-ranking Grammaton Cleric into finding the Underground for them. But she imagined that their plan would backfire, for John was stronger than Errol had been, perhaps stronger than anyone knew. Once the Vice-Consul allowed John's feelings to be unleashed, he created a double-edged sword...a weapon of the resistance who would fight for the resistance. A fire he could not control.

* * * *

Mary knew she should hope that John would forget her. Yet with only hours to live, she found herself wishing that he was watching, feeling, sharing her punishment. That he would remember her.

She dressed in the red robe of the condemned, waiting at the Hall of Destruction for her turn in the flames. John's wife had walked the same path, she knew; perhaps she had worn the same robe. And Errol's corpse had burned in the city furnace as well. She felt terrified yet calm when she stepped into the chamber of her annihilation.

Turning as the doors locked her in, she looked through the glass pane to see John. He was too late, she knew. Once the time lock had engaged, the furnace had to fire; otherwise the turbines below would explode, destroying the furnace and killing anyone within hundreds of feet.

The despair so potent on John's face gave her strength -- he could not cry out, so she would not either. She would spend her last seconds in silent communion with the man her lover had loved, perhaps the only man deep enough inside the Tetragrammaton to destroy it. Her fingers clenched the material of the flammable dress they had given her to wear as she tried not to listen to the countdown to immolation.

Live, John, she commanded silently. Be strong. Do what Errol could not. One final time she was struck by the irony of the need to repress emotion in order to protect it, but she could do it now. As her final seconds slipped past, Mary pushed aside her horror and stood straight, willing her resolve to John Preston. Go now, she thought, and live in the world that Errol could never grasp.

She watched John burn with the fire that claimed her life.


End file.
